My new subscription to Paramount+ is allowing me to see Showtime documentaries that I never knew existed, and I watched two in the last two weeks about groundbreaking Black entertainers. The first was about Bill Cosby, and the second was about Michael Jackson and the ongoing legacy of his Thriller album. I was moved by each, and the juxtaposition of the two was dramatic.
We Have to Talk About Cosby is a searing, heart-wrenching 4 hour documentary that is amazingly powerful because it is not a hit job by W. Kamau Bell. It doesn’t “whitewash” all the huge positive impact Cosby had on Hollywood and eventually the Black and even the White culture in this country. (I use ‘whitewash’ deliberately and provocatively). It equally, and simultaneously, in a Joe Friday, “Just the facts, Ma’am” way, makes us see the malignantly evil deeds of Cosby that occurred at exactly the same time, but out of the public’s eye.
Thriller at 40 helped revise my view of Michael Jackson as an artist. I had previously given Jackson credit for being a master entertainer, but considered Thriller to be as musically entertaining as it is because of Quincy Jones producing it. Jones, like Paul McCartney is a master arranger, bringing in appropriate instruments at the right times, in the right amounts, but the video clearly shows that it was Michael Jackson bringing together a throng of geniuses, producers, guitarists, mixers and making full use of all their talents to match his vision.
The film also highlights Jackson’s stunning dance moves and choreography that electrified the world at the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever live performance that showcased his dancer’s percussive kicks, ankle twisting and hip busting moves, topped by the innovative moonwalk and included a triple spin that would do a figure skater proud, finishing with him squatting and shuffling backwards on his toes in a way never seen before even in ballet. Jackson is recorded, retelling how, the next day, he received a call from Fred Astaire, calling it magnificent and saying he watched Jackson’s performance 3 times.
Cosby, when he co-starred on I Spy, was directly responsible for the first black stuntman in Hollywood because he refused to have a stunt double play him in the equivalent of blackface. His comedy was much more universal and palatable to white audiences than the more ghetto-focused comedy of Richard Pryor. His famous early bit Noah is just a hilarious retelling of the biblical narrative. His renditions of his childhood may not have been exactly culture-neutral, but the stories he related from a Black middle-class 50’s background were hardly any different from mine from my own 50’s White Irish Catholic neighborhood, if exaggerated enough to be outrageously funny. Likewise his tales of Fat Albert and the gang were just as understandable to those of a white kid growing up in the 50’s rather than what seemed the exotic hang-out-on-street-corners Richard Pryor tales from the “underclass”.
He advocated black causes while at the same time starring as the brains of the Culp-Cosby pair on I Spy. Also noteworthy was that he portrayed a professional tennis coach in a lily-white sport, long before the Williams sisters and even before Arthur Ashe appeared on the scene. Later his Fat Albert cartoon series was the equivalent of Charlie Brown. Many might accuse such things as just the next generation of blackface, of trying to erase black culture, but, in reality, it spearheaded an important shift away from racist attitudes. When Martin Luther King Jr. was introduced to Nichelle Nichols who told him she was going to quit Star Trek because she felt like a token who did little more than open hailing frequencies, he pleaded with her not to, because just seeing a black woman as an accepted part of the crew of a starship made a huge impact. Indeed, Whoopi Goldberg described her childhood discovery of Star Trek as her yelling to her mother, “Mom! Look! There’s a black woman on TV, and she’s not a maid!”
Later, The Cosby Show, while it showed an upper middle-class black family, hardly shied away from the distinct black culture in the US. The show featured paintings by black artists on the walls of the sets, the family attending black cultural events, and characters wrestling with whether to attend Historically Black Howard University over what the White audience, from their point of view, would believe were more prestigious Ivy League schools.
The film also documents almost irrefutably how Cosby was simultaneously drugging and raping young women for decades. Yet it also shows how some of his most critical opponents even now are forced into unwilling laughter at his performances. The documentary lays bare how Cosby developed practically an assembly line of victims for him to drug and then rape as they lay unconscious, then to dismiss them in scorn when he was done. Anyone with a scrap of a conscience can hardly not be moved to utter disgust from watching all the testimony. There’s no room for pretending that it was somehow a fabrication of his critics. Yet I can’t help but remember the wholesome comedic genius he wielded. As one commentator explained, he was a genius at comedy and a genius at raping women and getting away with it, since their drugged state left them mostly only conjecture at what had happened to them and very unreliable witnesses in a court’s eye.
I found myself struggling with whether my disgust and revulsion for Bill Cosby shouldn’t be the same as mine for Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was the more traditional, “Have sex with me, or you’ll never work in this town again,” variety, perhaps slightly less morally reprehensible because he used coercion rather than drugs to satisfy his lecherous desires. That seems a distinction without much difference, but Weinstein worked in the background. If he was any type of genius or in any way responsible for movies I enjoyed, it was out of the spotlight. I could pretend he had nothing to do with films I liked that had his name in the credits. It all seems the very definition of cognitive dissonance, and I thank the film-maker for removing any of my ability at denial.
Unfortunately the documentary also uncovered for me an undeniable coincidence that would be hard to minimize after I watched Thriller 40, a documentary about the making of Michael Jackson’s historic album. Jackson’s accomplishment with Thriller can hardly be minimized, given that it is still celebrated 40 years on, and is still the best selling album of all time.
What the Thriller documentary doesn’t do is even touch on the rumored dark side of Michael Jackson. It briefly mentions the accusations that he had plastic surgery to look less Black, and some kind of alleged surgery to keep his vocal cords in a high-pitched adolescent state. It doesn’t even mention the major controversy of Jackson’s life, namely how he was accused of grooming and using teen age boys as illicit sex partners. Though neither he nor Cosby were convicted of the criminal activity attributed to them (Cosby was convicted but his conviction was overturned.), both paid large settlements to abuse claimants. Like Cosby, Jackson is alleged to have created an assembly line of potential victims by inviting underage boys to his “Neverland Ranch”. Neverland was private carnival and zoo, whose very name implies Peter Pan and boys who never grow up. Clearly he lived a life, giving himself such opportunities, but how many of us dismissed such speculation as tabloid nonsense, the same way it was easy to dismiss the rumors about Cosby?
Clearly we have two certified geniuses in their chosen fields here, both with sleazy and dubious private lives. Why has Cosby’s legacy been irrevocably stained but Jackson’s legacy remains untouched by similar alleged scandals? The Cosby documentary makes it very clear why. In 2004 Cosby began publicly rebuking the younger generation of Blacks in this country for not learning to speak English in a way understandable to the larger culture, thus limiting their opportunities to advance, as well as stealing things, being shot during robberies and then blaming police. Many in the Black community considered this “victim shaming”. America’s Dad had gone from the wise, nurturing Father Knows Best dad to the angry dad, lecturing the kids about having to get their act together and grow up. After that the culture at large considered Bill Cosby fair game.
To the American legal system both are equally innocent from a criminal standpoint and both equally liable from a civil standpoint having both paid out large settlements to those claiming abuse. Can I excuse Michael Jackson the same way I, for years, excused Bill Cosby? Yes, the alleged crimes of Michael Jackson have not garnered the same level of public testimony as Cosby’s, but is that merely because there has been no public outcry to denounce Jackson because he did not go around lecturing the underclass kids about their way of life? I can’t shake the feeling that the real difference is merely that the mainstream media is willing to ignore scandals and just look the other way for their hero in one case, but not the other.
These two giants had huge impact on our culture and have had remarkable influence on the way we see the world through their accomplishments in the arts. Can we celebrate them for that even as we acknowledge their depraved personal lives? Can we celebrate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as founders of our country and inspirations for us even though both owned slaves? Can we separate anyone’s achievements from their private lives? Should we? Can we admire and even emulate their public lives and deeds even as we excoriate their private lives? Can we have heroes anymore?
Musings of a Restless Mind 